March 2018

Quality content is quickly becoming a brand differentiator for businesses trying to compete for online visibility. Companies able to maintain a steady stream of great content can capture larger online audiences, earn higher search engine results rankings, position themselves as thought leaders and strengthen the overall performance of their marketing funnel.

The question for businesses, then, isn’t whether they need a content writer but rather how they should go about working with one. Hiring a full-time writer (or a stable of writers) as part of your in-house marketing team is one option while outsourcing the work to various creative agencies or freelancers is another option. Some business also choose a mixture between the two.

Deciding which route to go for your own content marketing needs depends completely on your unique goals, how you want to portray your brand online, and how those requirements might shift as time goes on.

When weighing your options for creating content marketing pieces, don’t overlook the significant benefits outsourcing your workload to an agency can have. While on-boarding content writing staff or working directly with a freelancer can both be viable options, they barely scratch the surface of what a content marketing agency can offer.

When working with an agency, you have the ability to dramatically upscale the quality, quantity and overall reach of the content created for your digital marketing campaigns.

For instance, a content writing services provider can give you a set cost for creating a high-quality asset like an eBook that includes all the services you need like graphics and a paid social media promotion budget. When managing such a campaign in-house, each of these services and the tools required to make it happen are an individual cost.

Content marketing has gotten bigger than ever, but not every business is reaping the benefits. When looking at their targeted marketing metrics, many are finding that their content marketing efforts fail to make the needle move.

So what can these organizations do to improve? They can start by considering the following five common mistakes below. Therefore, these can cripple your content marketing performance and stand in the way of building audiences who can become business leads.

The size of your content marketing budget dictates a lot of things. It controls the level of performance you can expect. It also influences how scalable your overall content reach can be — bigger budgets have the infrastructure behind them to reach exponentially more people with just some marginal extra spending.

At the same time, money doesn’t grow on trees. Most businesses operate on a very tight budget, and they have little wiggle room when it comes to how much they can allocate to marketing.

Another complicating factor is that many professionals are unfamiliar with the amount of work that should go into content marketing and the overall output they can expect. Setting a content marketing budget therefore requires you to clearly understand your content marketing goals and the types of marketing activities you need to make those goals happen.